Mike has a problem with managing his information.  He frequently has difficulty finding things, and recently was unable to locate the final version of an important report which he produced six months ago (he eventually got it from someone to whom he had sent it).  There was also a recent incident in which a report about a student had to be located urgently while he was away on three weeks’ leave.  This required getting the IT Department to grant access to his personal directories, and the report was only located after a great deal of searching.  His small office is crammed with filing cabinets and paper, and he complains about a lack of space.

You meet with Mike to discuss his problems.  You discover that:

• He doesn’t know how to set up folders in his e-mail package, so he saves all his emails in his inbox and sent items folder, which now contain several thousand emails.  In the past he has used the email package’s searching facility to locate items, but he finds this increasingly slow and unreliable.
• One of the three filing cabinets in his room turns out to be full of files, reports etc. which he inherited from his predecessor, who left five years ago.  He hasn’t “got around” to going through the material and has little idea what the cabinet contains.
• He likes to create paper files, and prints out and files emails, reports etc.  However, he also keeps the electronic originals in his email package and his personal directory.
• He creates paper files as he needs them and doesn’t follow any filing scheme.  A quick survey of the two cabinets containing his own files indicates that there is a lot of overlap and duplication between the files, and a lot of reference material (catalogues, printouts of web pages, printouts of policy documents etc.).
• Your department has a system of shared directories which was recently redesigned by a very efficient secretary based on the department’s functions, activities and transactions.  However, Mike rarely uses the shared directories and prefers instead to keep his electronic files in his own personal directory, but the organisation is haphazard and bears no relationship to the organisation of his paper files.  The names he assigns to electronic files are inconsistent and often vague e.g. “draft report”

List the problems with Mikes record keeping and give a solution to solve the problem.